This RFC has been scheduled for public discussion on June 28 (Wednesday) at 21:00 UTC (2pm PDT, 23:00 CEST). As always, the discussion will take place in the IRC channel #wikimedia-office
### Problem statement
The current way redirects work are as followCurrently `/wiki/Redirect` responds with the Target page, with three notable differences:
* A "Redirected from .." message is rendered.
* A piece of JavaScript is inserted that will jump to the destination `#Section` (if any).
* A piece of JavaScript is inserted to normalise the address bar from `/wiki/Redirect` to `/wiki/Target#Section`.
Internals:
* Page markup (wikitext) refers to the title as specified. – `[[Redirect]]` is saved as-is, no pre-save transformation)
* Page rendering refers to the title as specified – HTML: `<a href="/wiki/Redirect">`
* When clicking on such link within the wiki, or otherwise navigating "to" the redirect, the server responds with a modified version of the response for the target of the redirect. – `/wiki/Redirect` responds the same as `/wiki/Target`, including a `<link rel=canonical>` specifying `Target` as canonical, and a special header informing the reader "Redirected from Redirect".
* Once the page is rendered, JavaScript does two things:
* Jump to the intended section (if any).
* Swap the address bar from `/wiki/Redirect` to `/wiki/Target`. This encourages further social sharing to share the canonical link, and makes it so that those other people will not needlessly see "Redirected from Redirect" - which doesn't apply to those readers.
Benefits:
* Parser cache: Changing the redirect does not require invalidating parser cache of incoming links.
* Performance: "Following" a redirect responds quickly (no HTTP redirect).
* Usability: Users know when they followed a redirect (header message "Redirected from"), and the message doesn't show for others when you share the link.
* Search engines: No indexing of duplicate content. (due to canonical url).
Problems:
* **Redirect to heading**: When redirecting to a heading on a destination page (e.g. `Topic` redirecting to `General#Topic`), the browser does not natively jump to this heading because it's rendering content at `/wiki/Topic` not `Topic#Topic` or `General#Topic`. This is currently worked around with JavaScript. While this technically works it is bad in two ways:
* Performance: The jump happens very late. Sometimes 5-10 seconds after the first paint, because it waits for all content to arrive and all JavaScript to arrive and execute.
* Fallback: In our Grade C experience for older (but supported) browsers, the jump never happens.
* Fallback: It also means that on supported browsers, the jump doesn't happen if there were intermittent connection issues.
* Fallback: There is no recovery for the user when the jump doesn't happen. There is no manual way to get to this information (it's hidden in invisible JSON data)
Original task description### Solution 1
Change the response of `/wiki/Redirect` to be an HTTP redirect to `/wiki/Target?rdfrom=Redirect#Section`, with client-side code to normalise to `/wiki/Target#Section`.
This addresses all the problems.
* Drawback: Users will be subject to an HTTP redirect.
* Benefit (compared to Solution 2): Redirects are instantly up-to-date (no need to wait for job queue).
### Solution 2
Change the response of `/wiki/Redirect` to be an HTTP redirect to `/wiki/Target?rdfrom=Redirect#Section`, with client-side code to normalise to `/wiki/Target#Section`.
In addition, optimise the common case by changing the Parser to resolve to this url ahead of time.
* Benefit: Faster user experience for the common case.
* Drawback: Updating of urls depends on job queue, similar to template transclusion updates.
>>! Original task description:
>
> With Javascript disabled/not available:
>
> *Links to sections, works correctly, e.g. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albatross#Biology|Albatross#Biology]]
> *Links to sections via a redirect, works correctly, e.g. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beiruit#History|Beiruit#History]] -- ([[Beiruit]] is a redirect to [[Beirut]]).
> *Links to sections via a redirect to a section, do Not work correctly, e.g. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden Market Fire|Camden Market Fire]] takes you to the top of the target page but not to the section -- ([[Camden Market Fire]] is a redirect to [[Camden Market#Incidents]])
>
> Fixing this may partially fix the section links issue in {T53122}
>
> See also:
> * {T144781}
> * {T37858}
> * {T20883}
> * {T37045}